Jeanette Angell on Penguin's User-Centred Redesign

Q&A: Jeanette Angell on Penguin's user-centred redesign

Publishing brands Penguin and Dorling Kindersley, both part of the Penguin Group, recently completed a project to relaunch their websites and improve interaction and navigation for users.

The revamp was pretty far reaching - the team took a user-centred approach, with extensive usability testing and planning, and found new ways to think about marketing books via the site. Here, Penguin and DK's online development manager Jeanette Angell speaks about the reasons behind the project and the techniques it used.

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- Can you run through the main aims of the relaunch?

The aims of relaunching dorlingkindersley.co.uk and penguin.co.uk were to improve the processes of finding, choosing and buying a book and to bring to the fore the inspirational content that we produce about our books. Additionally, we wanted to encourage more interaction between us and our readers.

Internally, we also wanted to establish an efficient system that could make our full catalogue easily accessible, demanding fewer resources, and enabling us to focus our time on creating inspirational tools and content for our readers.

At heart, our overall strategy was to focus on our readers’ needs and for them to be able to establish a relationship with us; our books, our authors and ultimately each other. The first step was to involve them in the relaunch process, which we did by adopting a user-centred design (UCD) approach to the project, conducting usability analysis on the current site, analysing those findings and re-testing our new site designs before committing to build. Our readers are now at the heart of everything we do.


- What usability techniques did you adopt and what were the main findings?

Our first step was to analyse the sites we had; establish what people wanted from our websites and whether we were on the right track with our assumptions; and identify the key usability issues in the journey from home - search results – product page – checkout - order.

Working with Flow Interactive, we conducted a series of one-on-one observation sessions asking people to perform tasks such as finding books, choosing books, buying a book, looking for content they were interested in and so on.

If there’s anyone reading who hasn’t yet sat behind mirrored glass, watching your visitors try and fail to do what seems to you to be the most obvious task, I urge you to experience it. The lessons learned from this experience can be staggering! Following this we went about identifying our key personas – four people who represent the different types of people who might be looking for books, or looking for information that might result in a book site visit.

We deliberately didn’t include people who were already loyal to the DK and Penguin brands, as we know from our newsletters and subscriber base that we already meet their core needs. Of course, any usability issues that we resolved for people not yet enjoying our brand and product would also bring benefits to our existing customer base.

Taking our personas, we examined tasks that would see them arrive on our websites. From our findings from the usability analysis, we launched an iterative design and test phase, working up a lo-fi prototype of the site that we then put in front of users again.

Establishing the wireframes to test took a significant amount of time, wall space and copious amounts of post-it notes (every web team's crucial tool). However, changing them to resolve issues found in subsequent test phases was quick and simple. Why? Because we had stripped back to critical, core features and had not yet committed branding, colour, style and more importantly, expensive unnecessary development time. Our testers could concentrate on the tasks in hand without having their judgement clouded by peripheral factors.

By the time we came to build, we were confident that we were building a usable site. The old adage that you can’t spend enough time planning is true – especially when you extend that to your IA, wire-frame construction and pre-design and build testing.

The main findings from the old site highlighted that our search was quickly abandoned, as it wasn’t getting people to the results they wanted. The information provided on product pages didn’t always lend itself to users concluding they had found a book they wanted: 'I wouldn't know if this was for me without picking it up'.

Additionally, where we’d created branded sites we’d send people off into dead ends and further, that we could do better in providing clearer information around our checkout process, delivery, shipping and availability. These are all common traps in the online retail space, but we also picked up a lot of information about what they did want in addition to that. The redesign has revolved a significant number of those issues.

An important part of the project for us was to make sure we included the whole online team in the process, from start to finish, rather than simply handing the entire project over to Flow and a digital agency. We adopted this workshop approach to the project because we believed it would derive the best results, and leave us with the skills and experience to apply our learnings and processes from this project to other work that we do.

Associated Link: Full interview on econsultancy

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